"Here" may be a bit misleading, as I don't sit still very often. But in regards to the blog, I have over one hundred unpublished, mostly finished drafts, I just.....didn't post them. I think sometimes it's because I often use this space like a journal. I use it to remember the weird stuff, the funny stuff, and sort of mentally kick around the sad or hard or confusing stuff. My blog is a smorgasbord of bullshit from my life.
So. Here I am. With my smorgasbord of bullshit, ready to try to post again.
Today we're going to talk about mice.
One of my favorite parts of my house is my screened in porch. It has a beautiful stone fireplace, a porch swing, an outdoor recliner, and LOTS of plants and flowers because I am a crazy plant lady who can't leave her house without coming home with some kind of new yard/porch flora. (I'm actually writing this on the porch right now, and from this vantage point, I have an herb garden, two gardenias, a hydrangea, a Mandeville with a trellis, several geraniums, purslane, a bunch of petunias, several pots of lavender, a vegetable garden, a bunch of trees, and some other shit that is green and has leaves but I don't know what it is because I bought it half-dead off the clearance rack at Home Depot and nursed it back to health because PLANTS DESERVE TO LIVE TOO, HOME DEPOT.)
I digress.
So I realized one night as I was sitting on my porch (probably tipsy) that I had mice. Fortunately, they are definitely mice and not rats, as they are little and cute, which led me to name all of them which is mildly difficult because it's hard to tell mice apart, especially when they just streak by you really quickly in semi-darkness after you've consumed three-quarters of a bottle of Chardonnay. But I did it anyway because it was fun and because MICE DESERVE NAMES TOO. I would sit in my chair with the string lights on and watch them run from behind the fireplace to behind the half-barrel with the herb garden in it, to behind the giant pot of purslane, then behind me to behind one of the random plants, and disappear through a teeny tiny separation of the screen out into the yard to PROBABLY eat the birdseed that falls on the ground from one of the zillion bird feeders I have because I've realized that, as you get old, you genuinely DO enjoy watching birds and although it's something I've made fun of in the past now I sit and drink coffee in the mornings and wonder when my pair of cardinals is going to show up and then I'm like, "Goddamnit, I've turned into a fucking senior citizen!" so then I go put on a push up bra and some glitter eye shadow and make the kids tell me I'm pretty.
I'm digressing again.
Mice. Anyway. I realized that we have a doggie door and the mice run right by it and they seemed to be getting braver (they started streaking by me in BROAD DAY LIGHT and stopping for a sec to look at me like, "Come at me, bro" and it freaked me out even though they are so cute and tiny and I just want to pet them) so I started to worry that they would INFILTRATE MY HOUSE which would not be cool because we already have a possible demon, definitely a few unrested spirits, two teenagers, four rambunctious dogs, and occasionally a lizard-- I DO NOT NEED MICE. I asked Blaker a few times to "handle it," but he didn't, probably because he's kind of ADD and also he's always busy, so I realized that this mice issue was something I would have to handle on my own. Naturally, I did what I always do, which is: 1) TONS of internet research; 2) Take notes on said research; 3) Wake up suddenly feeling like this is a time-sensitive, emergency problem and freak out, then go to Home Depot (without my notes) and spend 2 hours there re-Googling mouse control because I have forgotten everything I had written down. All this would have been fine, but we all know I AM A MAGNET FOR WEIRDOS. And, of course, this was no exception.
When I first got to Home Depot, I found the mouse control section and had been staring at the options for a bit when LADY #1 of the Home Depot staff came by and asked if I needed help. I explained that I had mice on the porch that I didn't want inside, but I also had 4 dogs (another blog about that later) so I couldn't put out anything that might hurt the dogs. So this lady, with her swagger and her 90s bangs (not judging, I think the 90s was the best decade ever and wish it would make an honest and true comeback) picked out a product for me and told me with 100% confidence that THIS WAS WHAT I NEEDED. It was a bait trap. I mentioned that I was trying to stay away from bait traps because I didn't want the mice to eat the poison, crawl into the fireplace and die and smell terrible (shoutout to Matt Wagaman for alerting me to the likelihood of this). She looked at me like I was stupid and assured me that NO, THIS WAS NOT A BAIT TRAP, IT WAS A MOUSE TRAP. THIS WAS WHAT I NEEDED.
When she walked away, I Googled said item. She was an idiot. This was a bait trap. It said so on the package, and Google confirmed.
Stressed, I went and looked at the garden center spoilage for a bit to calm myself down, loaded up my cart with about six plants I didn't need as a method of self-soothing, then returned to the mouse control section (at this point, I've been here for over an hour). LADY #2 of the Home Depot Staff then approached me and asked if I needed help. Now, I'd like to mention that this lady looked WAY more legit. She was wearing overalls and was older, and had this aura about her where you JUST KNOW that at many points in her life she had wrung the necks of chickens and probably milked some goats, possibly at the same time. When I explained the issue to her, she gave me regular mouse traps-- the snappy kind. I told her that I didn't want to HURT the mice, I just wanted them to go away. She pointed out that we were in the pest control section and mice were pests and NEEDED TO DIE, at which point I told her I was a BuddHinduChrist who believed in kindness and karma and non-murdery things. She rolled her eyes and sighed, and said, "Well, you don't want the glue traps, because those critters will literally chew their own leg off to get loose from them and I don't think you're ready to see that." Then she handed me this funny black boxy thing, which was apparently a humane trap that would lure the mice in, but not let them back out until I slid the lid off for them. I asked her if there was a special place where I should release the mice I caught, like a local mouse utopia or something, or maybe a mouse rescue somewhere, and she rolled her eyes again and told me no, just throw the box away after I catch a few, which obviously defeats the purpose of not getting the snappy kind, because they are still going to die except it will be a prolonged, painful death of wasting away in the trashcan. However, I didn't mention this because I was slightly frightened of HD Lady #2 and her hardass ways, so I just nodded and she left.
There had been an older gentleman standing near us listening to the conversation, and after #2 left, he kind of chuckled at me and said, "Ya got a mouse problem, huh? Me, I got a snake problem," and held up a gigantic container of something horrifying called Snake Away that had a big, scary photo of a snake on the front, rearing up to literally fang and venom somebody's ass. I told him THANK GOD my problem was mice and not snakes because I was not afraid of mice but snakes gave me PTSD every fucking time I saw one and that I WOULD JUST DIE if I had a snake problem, and then the snakes would crawl over my dead body and take over my home and Hollywood would make a sequel to Snakes on a Plane called Snakes on the Porch, starring my snake-gnawed-on-corpse. (I may have gone into way too much detail describing this to him, but I get Snake Mania and can't help it.) He kind of stared at me, shifted the chewing tobacco around in his mouth, and said, "Well, honey. You know if you don't get that mice problem under control, you're gonna have a snake problem, right?"
No. No. Fuck no.
I don't spend much time reviewing the food chain, so it's been a while, but SHIT SHIT SHIT he's right, snakes eat mice. So I did the obvious thing here. I sat down on the cold Home Depot floor and STARTED TO CRY. Not just cry--straight up gasping-for-breath-SOB, which really upset the old guy who had basically just set me back twenty years in my snake-phobia therapy. He started asking me to please not cry and saying that he'll give me his number and if I see a snake I can call him and he'll come catch it for me because he's not afraid of them, but when he sees I'm a lost cause he just grabbed his Snake Away and fled the scene.
By now, I'm emotionally exhausted. I grab two of the no-kill boxy traps, and, in my desperation, a pack of snappy traps and go straight to the checkout (I was in such a fog that I literally bought about 10 plants that I had to return the next day because I had nowhere to plant them). On my way home, I called my Mom to calm me down and she immediately told me to use the snappy traps, it'd be fine. So when I got home I baited two catch-and-release traps and one snappy trap (only one because I snapped my finger twice and it hurt like a motherfucker and pissed me off and so I gave up after one) and put them out on the porch. Approximately ten minutes later, I heard a loud SNAP that scared the shit out of me until I realized what it was, so I ran out and saw that I HAD CAUGHT A LIZARD.
I hadn't considered that we have nine million lizards and maybe they like peanut butter? Maybe they would get in the snappy trap? But it did, and of course, I freaked the fuck out and started screaming for Blaker or Sutton to come quick because I WAS HAVING A REPTILE EMERGENCY AND NEEDED ASSISTANCE STAT STAT! I ran inside to see if we had a drinking straw in case I needed to use it for lizard intubation or mouth-to-mouth, while B rushed out, managed to figure out (through my hysterical crying and gesturing) what was going on, and raised the bar on the trap. I made it back outside with my lizard crash cart just in time to see the lizard leap out and run off, just with a very crooked tail now, which was fantastic because the reason I was having a complete nervous breakdown was because I thought he was dead.
It's five o'clock now, and I'm barely holding myself together by a very frayed thread. I also didn't realize that Blaker reset the trap. In my head, since I had caught myself twice, then a lizard, I should probably just quit it with the snappy traps because the Universe was saying, "NO, BITCH." But he did, and the next morning I came out to see that I had caught Elon Mousk in the gentle, karma-friendly trap, and Mouselania Trump in the snappy trap, with her head half snapped off.
Of course I started freaking the fuck out again.
Blaker took Mouselania and disposed of her (I would have given her a good Christian burial except I was still in hysterics) and then we sat and talked about how sad it made us when we killed things, even bugs, except not snakes for me but even them apparently for him unless they were poisonous. We threw the rest of the snappy traps out and I smudged the screened-in porch with white sage to clear out any negative energy (mouse or otherwise) and since then I have only used the NICE traps and have now humanely relocated Elon Mousk, Dougie Mouser, MD, and Mousetini, who Bell got to name because I was feeling extra nice that day. I have also begun filming the mouse relocations and have started developing a TikTok following of people who I guess really like mice or really hate murder. As best I can tell, things are pretty under control on the porch and so, except for the penance and horrors that will befall me regarding the untimely death of Mouselania, everything is copacetic.
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